A real wife saver (good for kids, too)

By Michael Mihalevich

Küryakyn Passenger Pegs Part# 4571

Küryakyn

Upgrading from a Wide Glide with footpegs to a Road Glide with footboards, you’d believe your leg comfort would improve. It does to a degree, but when you’re riding 500-mile days, you need to stretch your legs. So you add highway pegs. But what about your passenger? Don’t they deserve a change of foot position on those 500-mile rides? You bet they do. That’s when Küryakyn comes to the rescue.

Küryakyn Adjustable Passenger Pegs are a definite “wife saver.” They allow the passenger four different foot positions for the long ride. I vividly recall the ride from Indianapolis to Kansas City before I had the Küryakyn passenger pegs on my Road Glide. My wife was ready to get off and walk the last half of the trip, since her legs were hurting so much from not being able to change foot positions. A week later, after I had installed the Küryakyn pegs, we were on our way to Sturgis from Kansas City. My wife couldn’t believe how much more comfortable she was when she was able to change foot positions.

The adjustable pegs lay flat behind the footboard when they are not in use, and you can fold them forward when you want to alter your footing position. If your passenger wants to, they can fully extend their legs and lay their calves on the passenger pegs. Küryakyn’s new design adds a bolt-action locking device to lock the pegs into two higher positions. From our experience, the two higher lockable positions would be more suited to your short-legged child passengers. Riding solo, you can flip the Küryakyn pegs back and fold the passenger footboards up out of the way.

Instructions for installation are simple and straightforward. The included photo illustrations are definitely helpful as well. I installed my Küryakyn Adjustable Passenger Pegs on the stock footboards of a 2007 Road Glide. The first hurdle was trying to figure out which assembly went on the right side and which went on the left side; or as Küryakyn stated: “Establish the proper orientation of the assembly.” If you continued to read the instructions, you would find that they would answer that question for you: “There are three screws on each clamp assembly. When the Retractable Pegs are installed on the appropriate side of the bike, the single 5/16″ clamp screw will be forward of the stock footboard mount.” Pretty simple, even for a nonmechanical person such as myself.

“They install in about 25 minutes.” I guess they knew that I would run into a slight difficulty with one of the 5/16″ clamp screws. I had replaced the stock exhaust system with Vance & Hines Dresser Dual Exhausts. The clearance for one of the clamp screws above the right-side exhaust pipe was less than an inch, and did not allow for the use of a standard Allen wrench. I ended up using one of the bits from a multi-bit ratcheting screwdriver, clamped in a pair of vise-grips, to tighten that one last clamp screw.

If you happen to be running a set of Rinehart True Dual Exhausts, you need to check the combination of parts necessary to allow installation of Küryakyn Adjustable Passenger Pegs.

One other point that Küryakyn makes is that “periodic maintenance may be required.” After a few months of use, I found that the bolt that the adjustable swingarm pivots on worked itself loose. Naturally, this occurred on the left side where the bolt is inaccessible due to the proximity of my left-side Vance & Hines dual exhaust pipe. To tighten the swingarm pivot bolt, I had to remove the assembly by removing the three clamp screws. That’s about a 20-minute process, since you have to remove three screws, tighten the pivot bolt, and replace the three clamp screws, while lying on your back next to the motorcycle. Luckily on the right side, the pivot bolt is easily accessible with an open-end wrench.